Microsoft has issued its pre–Patch Tuesday report, saying it will issue seven patches fixing 12 code flaws next week – but it won't provide a permanent fix for the exploit discovered during the recent holidays that is already being used in the wild.

Google and other browser vendors have taken steps to block an unauthorized digital certificate for the " *.google.com" domain that fraudsters could have used to impersonate the search giant's online services.

Are your favourite vendors helping you to market successfully? We just published a report for our clients where we highlight best practices in marketing enablement, based on a series of interviews with 10 channel partner marketing executives.

Radiation that gives you super-strength instead of disfiguring or killing you, spider bites that empower you to fight crime instead of threatening your life with a potentially fatal allergic reaction: when it comes to superheroes we need to suspend a decent amount of disbelief.

I’ve always been strangely fascinated by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary - amazing how time flies, even when you’re not an agent of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations - it’s the densest and most mythology-rich of all the Star Trek TV shows. Often ambitious and audacious, it won more battles than it lost and remains a box-set must-own for any card-carrying Starfleet fan. However, it was also paradoxically (at times) the slowest, ugliest SF show on the box.

Analysis
The dust has yet to settle on yesterday's ruling in which the US Federal Trade Commission cleared Google of biasing its search results to nobble its competitors. But rival Microsoft is already accusing the ad giant of failing to be a "responsible" leader and is claiming victory in the lengthy antitrust case.

Being half Scottish, many of my summers were spent camping in the glens. After the daily grind of hitting each other with sticks, getting bitten by midges and eating fried spam, my sister would fill our evenings by reciting The Lord of the Rings – from memory! Being a more committed geek than me, by the age of 14 she had somehow managed to memorise, literally, word for bloody word, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. However, she never managed The Silmarillion.

The timing of Google chairman Eric Schmidt's planned visit to North Korea has been slammed by the US government. The search supremo is due to head out to the super-secretive internet-unfriendly nation soon after the launch of a long-range rocket by the Kim Jong-un-led country.

What next for the technology executive who saddled his previous employer with a controversial flagship operating system, polarised management and swiftly left under a cloud? Telling others how to build successful products, of course.

We hear from insiders that EMC has a new all-encompassing storage system in development that includes object storage. It's based in Seattle, it's called the Bourne Project, and EMC no doubt hopes it will kick ass like the eponymous hero of the movies.

Reader Miguel Barreiro has proposed that the El Reg Standards Soviet adopt the charging adult elephant as an official unit of force following its deployment as a measurement of thrust of Copenhagen Suborbitals' HEAT-1XP rocket motor.

Open ... and Shut
It's clear. The way to win in mobile is to solve an exceptionally difficult problem. Apple first did it by streamlining the mobile experience through an integrated OS and app-discovery and installation experience. Google then went a step further and crunched mountains of data to make mobile services breathtakingly powerful. The next big mobile company needs to be prepared to do something equally hard. And probably different.

Economists had been worried that late October superstorm Hurricane Sandy, which didn't show an immediate effect on the employment situation in November, would wallop job creation in December. Because of this, they predicted, the Bureau of Labor Statistics might have to go back and revise its November figures downwards when the December report was issued today.

A member of the IMAGiNE piracy crew, which specialized in recording and distributing movies filmed in cinemas using camcorders, has received a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to copyright infringement.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has asked the software community to help advise it on how to properly handle software-related patents – a move that could represent the first steps toward software patent reform.

Moore's Law puts supercomputers out to pasture because power – not just the cost of electricity, but the availability of juice – is the biggest constraint at the big supercomputing centers. And sometimes the lack of budget helps lock the gate, and HPC cloud computing butchers the cow.